* Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 111.
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" I live, yet not I." It was the result, not of conscious self- culture, but of deliberate self-sacrifice. The less they considered self, the more freely they spent themselves in the service of their Master and His cause, the more fully and vividly they became aware of an inward transformation, of a deepened and heightened consciousness of enlarged sympathy and increased power; they were already entering into life.^
III.
The Change that will come ovee our Body.
1. When Christ comes He will transfigure our bodies. St. Paul might have dwelt on many great blessings the full meaning of which will be unfolded when Christ comes ; for He is to conform all things to Himself. But St. Paul prefers to signalize what shall befall our bodies ; for that makes us feel that not one element in our state shall fail to be subjected to the victorious energy of Christ. Our bodies are, in our present state, conspicuously refrac- tory to the influences of the higher kingdom. Eegeneration makes no improvement on them. In our body we carry about with us what seems to mock the idea of an ethereal and ideal life. And when we die, the corruption of the grave speaks of anything but hope. Here, then, in this very point the salvation of Christ shall complete its triumph, saving us all over and all through. He " shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation, that it may be conformed to the body of his glory."
The doctrine of the resurrection corresponds to the mysterious duality of human nature. The body is, after all, the home of the soul, endeared, even like the actual home, by the very sorrows that have been endured within it ; and we can conceive of nothing entered upon in separation from it that is worthy to be called life. It has not entered into our hearts to conceive what God shall fashion for them that love Him. It is enough that when that which is perfect is come, that which was in part shall be done away. As we have borne the image of the earthy we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. All our purified powers and faculties will harmonize with their transfigured expression.
^ A. W. Robinson, The Voice of Joy and Health, 139.
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By the influx of Christ's endless life, the soul shall be endued with a symbol and instrument conformed to the glory of its Eedeemer. Yet even then, looking back in remembrance, each saint will confess : " It was good for me that I was humiliated."
^ The meaning that St. Paul has in his mind, and expresses in the language of the Greek, is this — Christ shall change the temporary fashion of the body of our humiliation into the abiding form of His glory. There are two conceptions of the body. The body of humiliation wears only a temporary fashion, whereas the body of glory wears an abiding form ; and the work of the Lord Jesus is to stamp upon the body of our low estate, which only for a time bears the marks of its low estate, the abiding, the eternal form of the body of His glory. That is the Christian view of the body. How profound it is, and how continually it has been over- looked. The mere fact that our translators originally used that form " our vile body," is in itself a proof of the way in which the true view of the body had been overlooked, and was overlooked for so many ages. In the earliest times when men began to think, they were conscious of the difficulties that arose owing to the limitations which their bodily weakness imposed upon them. As soon as human thought turned into a moral system at all, men were divided into two classes of thinkers embodied in the old systems of the Epicureans and the Stoics — those who allowed their body to master them, and those who determined to master their body. The latter school attempted to accomplish their object by despising and condemning the body as something low and essentially degraded. That idea lived long; and that idea was in the minds of our translators when they shortened St. Paul's language and used the form of " our vile body " as being the obvious antithesis to " his glorious body." In so doing they omitted, they had not before them, the true Christian conception of the body and its place.^
^ It must have required some courage, in a time when more and more the stern Koman spirit was being affected by Greek modes of thought, to hint at humiliation in connexion with the human body. Look at that Apollo, with his exquisite limbs and perfect features, unruffled with care, untouched by pain, trans- planted, as it were, from another world, and by absolute right taking up the soil of anything lesser, crushing out anything less developed, drawing in all pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness of life into the fuller development of perfect symmetry ! Look at the builders of the Parthenon, and then talk of a body of humiliation !
^ Bishop Mandell Creigbton.
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Look at the athletes in their games, with those splendid muscles and splendid limbs ! Look at the Epicureans, in the full flight of unbridled satisfaction ! What place is there here for humilia- tion ? 1